VMware Fusion will happily install ESX as a guest machine.VMware’s Unity feature actually merges Coherence and Crystal without needing to just drop all barriers between the VM and the host.VMware’s Unity feature in v3 isn’t broken (as opposed to Coherence with dual monitors currently being dead).So, what are my thoughts of it so far after a day of running with it? As I only have one VM on my Mac Book Pro, as opposed to 34 on my Mac Pro, I felt that testing Fusion out on my Mac Book Pro to start with would be a good idea. With the recent upgrade to Parallels v5 being a mixed bag (much better performance, Coherence broken for 3+ weeks whenever multiple monitors are attached), on Thursday I decided I’d had enough and felt it was time to start at least trying VMware Fusion. (Honestly, PC server manufacturers just don’t even try to make their systems quiet.

While this wasn’t previously an issue having an ESX server in my lab, I’ve slowly become less tolerant of noisy computers and so it’s been less desirable to have on – part of the reason why I went out and bought a Mac Pro. Unfortunately these are usually heavily geared towards running within a VMware hosted environment, and rarely if ever port across to Parallels. As an employee of an EMC partner, I periodically get access to nifty demos as VMs.

Parallels versus fusion